Twitter Acquires Social Media Analytics Company

Twitter has acquired social media analytics company BackType to help business users mine social media data for business insights.

For Twitter, acquiring BackType gives the company the capability to analyze its network of tweets. The BackType social media analytics platform helps users better understand the business effect of engagement on Twitter and other social platforms by using social media analytics to sift through social conversations to provide data on the reach of tweets and social content.

BackType describes its service as a way measure engagement and its impact on KPIs such as revenue, page views, sign ups, downloads and more. The company claims it can also track when your customers see a tweet that influenced them to make a purchase hours, days, weeks or even months later.

"Joining Twitter gives us the opportunity to bring insight to tens of millions of publishers around the world that are using Twitter to communicate and connect with their audience," BackType said in its blog announcement. "We're also excited to bring our technology (especially Storm) to Twitter where it can have a big impact across the company."

BlackType's BackTweet product will be offered to current users for free, but as the company focuses on work at Twitter (the BackTweet team will relocate to the Twitter office), new registrations for BackTweets will not be accepted and the BackType product and API services will be discontinued.

Related Articles

"We're very excited to not only join an amazing company that's changing the world, but to continue building products in pursuit of our shared vision with Twitter," said BackTweet.

According to recent statistics posted on the Twitter Blog, halfway through 2011, users on Twitter send 200 million tweets per day. With the acquisition of BackType and the social media analytics platform, Twitter will be able to measure and track these millions of daily tweets as the 140-character (or less) messages travel through the Twitter network.